Dr. Vigneswara Ilavarasan shared the findings of the Systematic Review on ICTs and Microenterprises with thirty five junior faculty members, as an invited lecturer at the one day “Quality Improvement Workshop on Industry and Society: Contours of Work in the New Economy”, at IIT Roorkee, 18 Jan 2016. At least ten of faculty members are in the initial stages of PhD. The findings of the review are most likely to be explored further by them. Three faculty members said that the topics from the talk shall be allotted to master thesis in their respective colleges.
Singapore’s Singtel, Hong Kong’s 1Com, China’s Xinwei and China Telecom, Vietnam’s Viettel, South Africa’s MTN and Free from France have reportedly submitted non-binding expressions of interest to become Myanmar’s fourth mobile operator. That’s a long queue of heavyweights from Asia, Africa and Europe. Especially the maverick French billionaire Xavier Niel’s debut in Asia possibly through Myanmar will be cautiously watched by Telenor and Ooredoo. Will he mercilessly flatten Myanmar’s telecoms landscape with the fury of competition, as he did in France? “We are looking for a company that can fulfill the remaining objectives of the current government in terms of telecoms reform,” said U Zaw Oo, an advisor to the president.
This report is the result of research conducted by GSMA’s Connected Women programme and LIRNEasia in Myanmar in 2015. LIRNEasia’s nationally representative baseline survey of ICT needs and usage in Myanmar showed a gender gap in mobile ownership of 29% by March 2015. Together with GSM Association’s Connected Women program, LIRNEasia explored the reasons behind this gender gap through a series of in-depth interviews and focus group discussions held in Yangon (urban) and Pantanaw (rural) among 91 men and women in July 2015. Further questions on mobile internet awareness and use, as well as barriers to use were explored, yielding a rich set of findings and a large set of policy recommendations. Read full report: Mobile phones, internet, and gender in Myanmar
We highlighted the value of interconnecting with the South Indian grid almost three years ago in a presentation made to a public hearing of the PUCSL and kept the issue alive through subsequent writing. Would have been happier if construction had commenced, but good to know at least the talk continues. There is a big opportunity here,” Damitha Kumarasinghe, director general of Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka said. “Now India is connected to Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka is the country which is outside this grid at the moment and there are power deficits at various time intervals in both countries.” He was speaking at the recently concluded 22nd Steering Committee Meeting of South Asia Forum for Infrastructure Regulation (SAFIR) held in New Delhi, India.
With Yogi Berra I’ve always believed that to be the case. So when Adil Najam called to ask me to contribute to a book on futures, my first reaction was to refuse. But I was persuaded. Data centers powered by cheap electricity and cool climes on the Southern slopes of the Himalayas featured large in the story. I had a good time working on it but I also feared something coming at me sideways.
A few weeks back, I raised a few questions about the incompleteness of a report on Myanmar’s international connectivity. I was happy to see today that the gaps have been closed. MPT, which has sharply increased spending on advertising since losing its monopoly in the mobile market, has been working on new international connectivity that involves bringing to Myanmar, SEA-ME-WE 5, an undersea cable owned by a consortium. MPT would not say when work would begin on the Myanmar branch of SEA-ME-WE 5. However, Yosuke Fukuma, a public relations adviser to MPT, and U Zaw Htay, an engineer in its overseas department, indicated that it would be operational by the end of 2017.
Our colleague Nalaka Gunawardene has written a summary/review of the World Development Report which this year focuses on ICTs, and included several references to Research ICT Africa and LIRNEasia research. Can a budget telecom like model help bring low cost internet within reach of South Asia’s majority of unconnected people? The Colombo-based ICT policy research organisation LIRNEasia has been studying this prospect for several years. As Rohan Samarajiva, LIRNEasia’s chair, wrote in 2010: “Broadband can be brought to the people by extending and leveraging innovative business models, as has been shown with voice telephony among the poor in South Asia. The lower prices and widespread coverage that are central to the model are also desirable public policy objectives.
Several years ago I stated at an Asia Pacific Telecommunity event that I was done talking about international mobile roaming. I had given so many presentations to various configurations of government officials with zero results, at least in terms of government actions. The jawboning effects were considerable nevertheless, and roaming pricing has improved to be benefit of customers and the operators. The talking had an effect. I am close to that point of frustration with Paypal’s inward payments facility for Sri Lanka.
Knowing the importance of networks, LIRNEasia has always probed about circles of friends and contacts and the role of ICTs in maintaining those relationships. Good to see the results of a study focusing entirely on that: The survey asked 2,000 people, chosen because they were regular social-network users, and a further 1,375 adults in full-time employment, who might or might not have been such users, how many friends they had on Facebook. The results showed, to no surprise whatsoever on the part of Dr Dunbar, that the average number of Facebook friends in the two groups were Dunbar-sized numbers: 155 and (when those who did not use Facebook at all were excluded) 187, respectively. Other details matched Dr Dunbar’s earlier work, too. This described a pair of smaller socially relevant numbers—a support clique (people you would rely on in a crisis) of about five and a sympathy group (those you would call close friends) of about 15.
I am in Myanmar with Disability Access Expert Nirmita Narasimhan of the Center for Internet and Society to initiate work on one component of our Myanmar as an Inclusive Information Society project. It is said by the experts in making devices and services accessible to those with disabilities that it should not be thought that such actions make things worse for “normal” users. So no wonder this piece from the Economist caught my eye: Robert Bosch, a German producer of car parts, among other things, recently displayed a touchscreen with “haptic feedback”. Visual effects, sounds and vibrations are already used with touchscreens to confirm when icons or keys are selected. What the Bosch system does is to add different surface textures to the mix.
We used to say that the only certainty about demand forecasts for telephony in developing economies was that they were wrong. It appears the same may apply to business strategies. Telenor had more demand for data than they envisaged. Ooredoo is planning to mass market data? Ooredoo’s focus on costlier data services, however, has meant that it fell behind its rivals in signing up subscribers: MPT boasts 18 million customers, while Telenor has 12 million.
Much of these findings I had heard from our researchers who did field work in Myanmar. But we did not make the Atlantic. All over the world, Internet cognoscenti are bemoaning the fact that not everyone uses the Internet like them, in many cases citing our research as reported by Quartz. But here is an interesting thought for them to ponder: But Facebook has a compelling advantage over other news apps or even Twitter: The content of many posts and news items live inside Facebook itself. There are external links, but most of the article summaries and photos are self contained.
I’ve been asked to comment on a brewing storm in a tea cup, the supposed opening of the gates to hordes of Indian IT workers. At this time, all that the government is considering is a Framework Agreement, or an agreement to work in a time-bound manner toward a technical and economic cooperation agreement. I was involved in the early stages of negotiation but have little knowledge of current state. Not having the time to engage with the issues in detail, I thought, I’d paste below the transcript of a talk I gave at the National Chamber of Commerce, along with the slideset. Addressing an audience of who I took to be diehard protectionist types from the world of commodities and goods, I had highlighted how much we had benefited from unilateral but incomplete (one still had to grovel before the BoI for most permissions) liberalization that allowed us to grow the telecom and IT & ITES sectors over the past two decades.
Sliding revenues from conventional wholesale services mean carriers are being challenged to find new drivers for growth. It has been the hot topic in this year’s Pacific Telecommunication Council’s Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii. I presented the Asia Pacific Information Superhighway as new avenue to revenue. Here is my presentation.
India started in April 2015, when the regulator (TRAI) proposed rules for how application/content providers (Over the Top Players, or OTTs) should be regulated, taxed and treated (that debate got sidelined in the battle over Facebook and FreeBasics, but that’s a different story). Now it’s South Africa’s turn. It seems that two operators are pushing for the regulator (ICASA) for regulation of OTTs, specifically that WhatsApp should be subject to local tax. These are two of the bigger telcos that are asking for this. Supporting their point of view of course are the national security hawks, who possibly don’t care about the tax, but want access to the OTT content (in this case, the content of WhatApp messages), and see this as the opportunity for catch-all regulation.
A carrier-neutral international cable that will connect Myanmar to Thailand and Malaysia is be operational by 2017. he story does not say anything about SEA-ME-WE 5, scheduled to be operational in 2016, and the AAE-1 cable scheduled for completion in Q4 2016. Nor is any mention made of the already built new links to China. Could this be because all the above except for SEA-ME-WE 5 are essentially cables that connect China to the world, which just happen to go through Myanmar? Any way, a carrier-neutral cable is always a good thing.